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What is Ruby?

Ruby is a general purpose programming language, invented by a Japanese programmer Yukihiro Matsumoto. The majority of design work was done back in 1990s, however, the language popularity took off only ten years later, in 2006, with Ruby gaining worldwide acceptance.

The official Ruby's website, http://www.ruby-lang.org, describes Ruby as "a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity," adding that "it has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write."

No modern language can effectively be used without an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and Ruby is no exception. Below is an overview of three popular IDE choices for Ruby language.

Overview of Ruby IDEs

There are three popular choices when it comes to Ruby IDEs: Aptana plugin for Eclipse, NetBeans for Ruby, and RubyMine. While all three bundles provide basic IDE functionality and offer seamless integration with Ruby's interpreter, there are many notable differences in their architectures, core features, and other aspects, as briefly summarized below.

Aptana (Eclipse Plugin)

Unlike its competitors, Aptana is not a true IDE package, but is merely a plugin for a very popular Eclipse platfrom. Installing Aptana is not as effortless as setting up the other IDEs, simply because it must follow a successful Eclipse install. Once Eclipse is up and running, the plugin can then be added.

Being an extremely lightweight platform, Eclipse has no official hardware requirements list. It is known to run on almost any hardware configuration while supporting dozens of OS platforms, from Windows to Linux to Mac OS. As an add-on to Eclipse, Aptana adds its own requirements, as following:

• Processor: Intel Pentium Intel Pentium IV or equivalent
• Memory: 512 MB

facilities, ease of use, system requirements, and support for the Ruby way of thinking.

NetBeans

NetBeans for Ruby is a free, cross-platform IDE based on customizable and easily expandable NetBeans framework by Sun Microsystems. This platform is known primarily for being a foundation of a very popular Java IDE bundle. Unlike Eclipse, which supports Ruby through plugins such as Aptana, Sun Micosystems decided to release a standalone Ruby-focused toolset.

The latest version of this IDE can be found at http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html. The installation is very straightforward, given that your hardware meets the following modest hardware specifications:

• Processor: 800MHz Intel Pentium III or equivalent (2.6 GHz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent recommended)
• Memory: 512 MB (2 GB recommended)
• Disk space: 750 MB of free disk space (1 GB recommended)

According to [3], the following major components are included in the NetBeans for Ruby bundle:

• Ruby Source Code Editor
• Ruby and Rails Debugger
• Support for Ruby projects
• Ruby Gems Installation Manager

RubyMine

• Processor: Intel Pentium III/800 MHz or higher (or compatible)
• Memory: 256 MB 1 GB RAM recommended)

facilities, ease of use, system requirements, and support for the Ruby way of thinking.

Links

[1] http://aptana.com/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptana

[3] http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/index.html

[4] http://www.netbeans.org/features/ruby/index.html

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29

[6] http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/